lunes, 2 de julio de 2012

YOU WANT TO WATCH THIS...

The future of humanity depends on whether “too big to fail” sectors of
the economy are taken under public control, creating a step-up socialist
model, believes Peter Mertens, Belgian politician and author, the head
of the Workers’ Party of Belgium.

PM: If you have the official figures everyone can
look them up and everyone can see that Greek people are working more
than 2100 hours a year – and that is for examples more than 600 hours a
year more than in Germany, more than 500 hours a year than in Belgium.
So this myth of the lazy Greek is not true. So I was asking myself why
they are saying such things in the mainstream media in Germany, in
Holland, in Belgium.
And I think it is easy to understand because
the establishment which profits from this euro story – for more than 10
years – is the German establishment and the Dutch establishment. So in
creating this false conception of the Greek people you can say: no, it’s
not a problem of economy, it’s not a problem of the Eurozone, it’s a
problem of lazy Greeks.RT: What about the
euro project? Some argue that whether the euro is needed or not in
pursuit of a United Europe is moot. The fact that it was chosen as a
single currency years ago means that the decision has been made and
there is no turning back. Do you agree with this?PM: So
you have in Europe this organization called the “European round table
of industrialists” and they are behind the scenes of the most powerful
organization which has pushed this concept of one euro since the end of
the 80’s in politics. From the beginning, European monetary union was
conceived as a concept to create a big competitive Europe that could
compete with the US, with Japan, etc, etc. And they knew very well that
at the beginning of the euro there were these large inequalities in
Europe.
So they knew it and they said: oh it’s not a problem, we
are going to create a system of convergence – that was the treaty of
Maastricht, and under the norms of Maastricht they said we are going to
level up all the countries to prepare for 2002, the introduction of the
euro. And now here we are 10 years later and we see that the
inequalities in Europe, they weren’t leveled up at all. But this euro
created more inequalities than ever in the last 50 years in Europe.RT: The country in focus – Spain has been prescribed with the same solution as Greece and Ireland.PM: I
think that really the financial sector all over Europe should be
transformed radically and we need a public sector in finance all over
Europe. Because now they can bailout Spain but it’s a very short-term
measure because structurally it isn’t changing a lot and I hope they
will help short-term. But you also need measures for the long-term in
Europe.
Einstein said once: stupidity, what is stupidity?
Stupidity is to do something twice and think there will be another
result. They said it would solve the crisis in Greece, now for five
years Greece has been in recession, becoming worse and worse. And now
they are going to take the same program to Spain and they are magically
expecting another result.RT: What does the socialism 2.0 you talked about in your book exactly mean?PM: I think this competitive system has to change seriously and

I think we are going to need again a socialist system where there is a
large public sector and a system where there is also large democratic
control and I think that for all those sectors that are too big to fail
for humanity, like the banking sector, like energy sectors, if it is too
big to fail for the future of humanity and the world you need to have
public control.

­There are two sources they say in Belgium, for
wealth. And the father of wealth is the work force: people are working
and thinking and creating things. This is the father of wealth. Then
you have the mother of wealth, they say, this is nature. This
capitalist system has a problem with its own father and its own
mother. They are exploiting the workforce and they are exploiting
nature. Socialism 2.0 in my view is a system that is not exploiting
its mother and its father but respecting the workforce and respecting
nature.

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the theory

"....but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'money' (nomisma) - because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [1133b 1]